Skip to main content
Main

Ox-palates a LA Florentine

Ox Palates à la Florentine is a stew of cleaned ox palates simmered with vegetables, spices, and stock, served with macaroni and sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ox-palates a LA Florentine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the palates

  1. Soak the ox palates in water with ½ cup coarse sea salt for several hours, handling them frequently to extract mucus.

  2. Parboil the palates in salted water until the outer cuticle is easily scraped off.

  3. Once cleaned, place them in a stewpan with carrot, onion, celery, parsley, cloves, mace, peppercorns, garlic, salt, and water or stock.

  4. Boil gently for about four hours until tender.

  5. Press between two dishes until cold.

Cut and glaze

  1. Cut the best parts into circular pieces using a cutter the size of a crown coin.

  2. Put the pieces in a stewpan with some of their stock and reduce to glaze.

Make and fry the Tolpetti

  1. Make Tolpetti with the trimmings, ham, and any other convenient meat.

  2. Crumb and fry the Tolpetti.

Serve

  1. Serve the Tolpetti alternately with the palates.

  2. Place macaroni a la Milanese in the center.

  3. Pour Italian or brown sauce around the base.

  4. Serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ox palates
Provide the main gelatinous meat that becomes tender during long gentle simmering.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the Tolpetti mixture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out mucus during the initial soak, helping clean the palates.

The step that matters

Boil gently for about four hours until tender. A hard boil toughens and breaks up meat, while slow gentle simmering lets collagen convert to gelatin, giving tender palates with a silky texture.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove, garlic, ham):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove, garlic, ham. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipes